As appeared on Federal News Network:
Don Parente, the vice president of federal sales and solution architecture at MetTel, said the upgrades that are needed aren’t a singular challenge.
“When you start looking at the copper going away, you might have voice lines that could be replaced with IP telephony or IP handsets, and move to a hosted IP based telecommunications platform. You might have these specialty lines that require these types of transformation capabilities where it still looks like [plain old telephone systems (POTS)] for the panel, but it looks like IP to the network. Then it’s taking it up a notch where you have the more traditional private branch exchanges (PBX) that exist inside of an agency and those are often served with larger trunks that are delivered over copper.”
Additionally, he said the Federal Communication Commission recently gave local exchange carriers permission to shut down copper wires, which is something they have been wanting to do for some time.